How Iran Nuke Standoff Looks to Saudis: Mustafa Alani

Tehran is located 811 miles (1,304 kilometers) from
Riyadh. In 2010, Saudi Arabia had a defense budget of $45.2 billion and 233,500 active armed forces personnel; Iran's defense budget was $7 billion with 523,000 active armed forces personnel. Saudi Arabia does not have a nuclear weapons arsenal; the capacity of Iran's nuclear program is uncertain. Charts by Everything Type Company

(Corrects scope of boycott described in third paragraph.
This is the second in a series of op-ed articles about Iran,
from writers in countries that have a direct interest in the
escalating debate over how to rein in its alleged nuclear
weapons program. For more Bloomberg View, click on VIEW <GO>)

Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The most likely victims of a nuclear
armed Iran are not the U.S. or Israel, but the Gulf states --
countries that are engaged in intense competition with the
regime in Tehran, but that lack the power to deter any threat or
aggression with a nuclear-strike capability of their own.

That, at least, is how it looks from Riyadh and other Gulf
capitals. Saudi Arabia has kept a low public profile amid the
heated international debate regarding the nature and ultimate
objectives of the Iranian nuclear program, and the country isn’t
yet ready to back a military strike. But that reticence hides
deep and genuine concern, demonstrated by the speed with which
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged to fill any
shortfall in global oil supplies that planned European Union
sanctions on Iran’s energy exports may cause.

A complete boycott of Iranian oil would result in the
disappearance of about 2.5 million barrels per day from the
international oil market, driving up prices sharply and damping
the global economy as it struggles to escape a slump.

To start with, the Saudis strongly believe that if Iran is
able to militarize its nuclear program while it remains a
signatory to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, or NPT, this would render the treaty worthless. The
likely Saudi response would be to seek a nuclear capability of
its own.

The Nuclear Path

Saudi and other Gulf country officials have made this point
clear to Western governments, though not in public. They have
told their Western counterparts that if Iran acquires a nuclear
weapon, they would feel themselves under no legal or moral
obligation to adhere to the treaty’s principles. In other words,
they would be free to go down the nuclear path. From the Saudi
point of view, the success or failure of the international
community in restraining Iran’s nuclear program will determine
whether the global nonproliferation regime survives.

Nor do the Saudis distinguish between Iran acquiring
nuclear capability and actually producing the bomb. In their
view, an unassembled nuclear weapon on the shelf is no less
dangerous and intimidating than a completed one in storage.

The dominant feeling in the Gulf region is that U.S.
policy, wittingly or unwittingly, has gifted Iran with painless
and costless strategic gains over the past decade. When the U.S.
removed the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and then toppled
Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime in Iraq, it lifted what had been
for Iran a state of siege and containment, imposed by the two
hostile regimes on its long eastern and western borders. U.S.
mishandling of the postwar situations in Afghanistan and Iraq
handed a further bonus to Iranian policy.

Iran’s release from that vise is worrying to Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf nations because they believe their Persian
neighbor represents a hegemonic state that is attempting to
implement aggressively interventionist and potentially
expansionist policies. So far, these policies have successfully
established states-within-a-state in both Lebanon and Iraq. Iran
is now vigorously trying to repeat those experiences in other
Arab countries that have Shiites among their populations.

Iran’s expansionist goals are exemplified in the occupation
of three islands in the Gulf that belong to the UAE. Second-tier
Iranian officials in recent years have also begun to revive
Iran’s territorial claim to Bahrain. In addition, Iran has
threatened repeatedly to “punish” the Gulf states and to close
the Strait of Hormuz, an important international waterway for
global oil supplies.

Iran as Troublemaker

The perception within this region is that Iran without
nuclear capability is a troublemaker and that with a nuclear
bomb it would probably become still more aggressive and
irresponsible. From the Saudi perspective, Iran doesn’t need
nuclear weapons for deterrence because, like other states in the
region, it doesn’t face a nuclear threat. Israel, Pakistan and
India, of course, all have nuclear weapons, but in the Saudi
view these countries do not pose an offensive threat. Israel,
for example, has a well-established superiority in conventional
weapons and therefore does not depend on nuclear deterrence.
Only as a state that has hegemonic aspirations and a misguided
superiority complex would Iran need the bomb.

Since 2003, when Iraq ceased to be an effective regional
counterweight to Iran, the Gulf states have invested heavily in
high-tech conventional-weapons systems in an effort to redress
the regional military imbalance. A nuclear Iran would make those
acquisitions moot, upsetting the delicate regional equilibrium.
That would be a new ballgame that none of the Gulf states feels
equipped to handle.

Saudi Arabia and its neighbors have no specific vision for
how to deal with the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. At this
point, they don’t favor a military option. They want first to
see serious and effective non-military pressure on Iran
intensified in quality and quantity. Should these measures fail
to halt Iran’s progress toward the bomb, the Gulf states would
reluctantly support military action, despite all its negative
consequences for the region.

If Iran is determined to militarize its nuclear program at
any cost, they reason, then the international community must be
equally determined to prevent that outcome at any cost.
Otherwise, the entire Gulf region would go nuclear.

(Mustafa Alani is the director of the security and defense
studies department at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center.
This is the second in a series of op-ed articles about Iran,
from writers in countries that have a direct interest in the
escalating debate over how to rein in its alleged nuclear
weapons program. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View.

To contact the writer of this article:
Mustafa Alani at alani@grc.net.